Zarko Bozinov - Abstract Artist
Unfinished
- acrylic on canvas
- 120x80cm
- 1999
- $1000
1964
The Crisis・of Abstract Art
In Paris abstract art is said to be in a crisis. Preuves, the monthly that is the French equivalent of Encounter,・is doing a symposium on the present situation of Informel art. To start it off, the magazine has sent out a mimeographed text (in English as well as French) containing excerpts from statements about contemporary painting solicited from half a dozen French writers. All of them express apprehension about the fate of art at the hands of Informel painting, which most of them take to be what the coinage, Informel, means: unformed or formless. Yves Bonnefoy writes that painting has become a devout contemplation of depths at which all form disappears. Jean Cassou: For the informel artist, to create is not so much to produce a work of art as it is to perform an act. Roger Caillois affirms that the Informel painter does not seek to paint nature, but rather to create as nature does,・and that he is guilty of a profound and sterile betrayal of the human species.... Andre Chastel asks: What can the eath of art mean to the artist? Or to the public?・Pierre Schneider, who is the only one to deny that Informel art is formless, writes: It may be that painting is dying precisely from its finally having come to understand itself....・Wladimir Weidle is satisfied to repeat the old complaint about the failure of abstract art to communicate.
These remarks constitute a sort of document, but one that has little to do, properly, with such a thing as a crisis of art. What it documents is a crisis not of art, but of its criticism: a crisis that is also by way of being a scandal. Reams of similar stuff have been written about postwar abstract art, and by non-French as well as French writers. There is nothing new in the Preuves document; one is surprised only by the confidence with which the contributors to it express received ideas. What's more, these writers (with the exception of Mr. Schneider), like all the others who retail the same ideas, seem to be pretty sure they are not repeating the mistakes made by past critics of avant-garde art. They at least take Informel and Abstract Expressionist Painting very seriously; they regard it as a geuine expression of the times; they certainly don't treat it as a hoax or outrage, the way past critics treated avant-garde art. If what they say about postwar abstract painting amounts to calling it mindless non-art, they are only repeating they can claim what is said about it by spokesmen approved of, supposedly, by the artists themselves artists, at least, like Georges Mathieu.
If they are right, if what these spokesmen and those who parrot them say has any validity at all, then it means that the further evolution of modernist art has finally redeemed the more egregious mistakes made about it by hostile critics in the past; and that these mistakes were not so much mistakes as insights, expressed prematurely, into the real direction in which modernist art was heading all along.
In 1875 Albert Wolff wrote of the Impressionists that grabbing canvases, paints and brushes, they throw on a few tones haphazardly and sign the whole thing! . . . [they] have raised the negation of all that constitutes art to the level of a principle; they have tied an old rag to a broomstick and made a banner of it.・To judge from what has been said about postwar abstract art by nine out of ten of its sympathetic critics, Wolff had a correct sense of the ultimate tendency of modernist painting. He was only wrong in sensing it too soon. And the critics and writers who say the same thing about Informel and Abstract Expressionist painting that Wolff said about Impressionism are right where he was wrong only because that tendency waiting so long to reveal itself fully. By rights they should commend Wolff for his prophetic insight. And they should also commend all those other critics who denounced the subsequent phases of modernist art in terms like Wolff.
By now I myself would commend Wolff for at least saying what he felt about Impressionism in disapproving instead of rapt and reverential tones. In being outraged at what he took for non-art he was at least true to art as he understood it, and true to his own experience. Nowadays non-art, or what is taken for that, is rhapsodized about. Even the apprehension felt about the fate of art under the sway of Formlessness is expressed deferentially, wistfully. Contemporary art writers not only repeat, they compound Wolff's mistake. Having made the same initial blunder that he did in taking new art for non-art, they go on to demonstrate, in addition to their aesthetic incompetence, their pusillanimity and intellectual irresponsibility. They weigh the merits of the formless as though it were possible to tell the difference between good and bad in non-art, and they discuss it all gravely and portentously.
Why art writing happens to be as bad as it is can only be speculated on, and I don't want to do any speculating here. What concerns me much more at this moment is art itself. The worst aspect of the foolishness of art criticism in taking new art for non-art is that so much bad art gets shielded thereby from appropriate value judgments. A lot of banal art which ought to be called that gets garlanded instead with phases about the pure act, action, the absolute, prayer, rites, the subconscious, gestures, and so on. Amid this palaver the degeneration of Informal and Abstract Expressionist art at the hands of its practitioners of the second generation has gone largely unnoticed. Some of the emptiest art ever created has been treated with the blindest respect. And it has taken a financial, not an artistic, crisis to even begin to open eyes to a part of this.
What the French call Informel, and we Abstract Expressionist or Action painting, continues the centuries-old tradition of painterly Malerischen, loosely executed, brushy painting. I myself prefer to call both Informel and Abstract Expressionist painting painterly abstraction, which I consider to be more accurate as well as more inclusive than either of the other terms. This is why the painterly used to be so often identified with the unfinished. And this is part of the reason why, when the painterly stopped serving representation, as it did in postwar abstract art, it became so widely identified with the formless, which is, notionally, the unfinished par excellence.
To see Painterly Abstraction as formless seems to me to be just as self-evidently absurd as it was to see Corot as unfinished or Impressionism as lacking in structure. Where it is a matter of self-evidence one can only point, not argue. I cannot argue form into an all-over Pollock any more than I can argue it into any other kind of painting: you either see it there or you don't see it there. All the diagrams on earth won't make you see it there if you don't in the first place. For me, Pollock's slapdashness is self-evidently just as much organized by its abstract functions as Tintoretto's or Constable's slapdashness is by its illustrative ones. And the success of a Pollock, like that of a Tintoretto, Constable, Magnasco or Soutine, depends on the extent to which the look of the haphazard is made to belie itself in the interests of communication and expression. And just as a successful Pollock succeeds in terms of form and art, so when a Pollock fails it fails in terms of form and art. There is nothing more to it than that.
If there is a crisis, it is not one of abstract art in general, but one of Painterly Abstraction in particular and it is a crisis of form and quality, of art and non-art. This crisis, such as it is, was touched off by the long stock-market decline in the winter and spring of 1962, which had nothing to do with art intrinsically.
By 1955 at the latest the expressive possibilities for Painterly Abstraction had turned by and large into an assortment of ready-made effects. The smears, swipes and lumps of paint left by a brush or spatula, and the shapes in which liquid paint disposed itself when spilled on a flat surface, had begun to connote the mannered and stereotyped for more than the spontaneous or fresh. The look of the accidental had become an academic, conventional look. This eventually had already been pointed to in the late forties, when the abstract daubs of three-year-olds began to look completely like art, because they were being overtaken by convention. If the crisis of Painterly Abstraction means the end of anything, it is the end of painterliness, at least for the time being, as a means of releasing spontaneity for expressive ends in abstract art. If a painting by a chimpanzee now legitimately qualifies as art, it is because it assimilates itself by its painterly, accidental look to what has become a new type of defective human art. Defective art, bad art, is still art; it still possesses form; defective art is indeed just the kind of art we are most familiar with in daily life.
Painterly Abstraction has collapsed not because it has become dissipated in formlessness, but because its second generation it has produced some of the most mannered, imitative, uninspired and repetitious art in our tradition. The grafting of the great and original achievement of the first generation of Painterly Abstraction, and the merits of that first generation are not in dispute here. But in the hands of those who came later this achievement degenerated into a blatant formula. Far from being formless, second-generation Painterly Abstraction is overformed, choked with form, the way all academic art is. Do I have to remind he readter that form as such is a neutral element as far as artistic quality is concerned? Thanks to Painterly Abstraction and the total experience of abstract painting, sensibility can by now invest with pictoral form almost any object constituting itself primarily as a flat, circumscribed surface, sidewalk squares, defaced walls, tattered posters, empty canvases. The young chimpanzee creates recognizable pictoral form as he paints by showing that he acknowledges the shape of the flat support as a limiting factor. Yet the fact that pictoral form has become so much easier to achieve does not make pictorial quality any easier to achieve than it ever was. It remains as rare as before, and subject to the same general conditions as before.
Being unable to identify Painterly Abstraction as art, contemporary art writers are even less able to identify it as a style with a set of distinguishing characteristics like any other style. The contributors to the Preuves document identify it, apparently, with abstract art in general, and seem to think that it exhausts all the important possibilities left in abstract art. Now it is true that Painterly Abstraction shares its Cubist infrastructure with all the other successful kinds of abstract painting in our tradition that, like these, it too relies on a created flatness, a created absence, or positive negation so to speak, of illusion. But Painterly Abstraction is also defined by its painterliness, and its painterliness limits it the way any other defining characteristic would. It limits it particularly with regard to color, the purity and intensity of which are more or less abated by the light and dark accents that are inseparable from painterly handling. Suprising as it may sound, Painterly Abstraction remains altogether within the tradition of value painting, painting that relies for its main emphases on light and dark.
What looms beyond, and grows out of, Painterly Abstraction is a newer (though not necessarily superior) kind of abstract art that puts the main stress on color as hue. For the sake of this stress painterliness is being abandoned, not to be replaced by the geometrical or the hard-edged,but rather by a way of paint-handling that blurs the difference between painterly and non-painterly. Harking back in some ways to Impressionism, and reconciling the Impressionist glow with Cubist opacity, this newer abstract painting suggests possibilities of color for which there are no precedents in Western tradition. An unexplored realm of picture-making is being opened up in a quarter where young apes cannot followw hat promises to be large enough to accomodate at least one more generation of major painters.
Arts Yearbook 7, 1964; Preuves, February 1964 (titled 鏑a 祖rise・de l'art abstrait・ Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 4, ed. John O達rian, 1993.
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